Books of The Times; The Short Stories From Which a Novel Grew

By CHRISTOPHER LEHMANN-HAUPT

Published: December 14, 1989

In a preface to these 13 stories about Larry Woiwode's fictional Neumiller family, the author explains how he came to publish them in this particular form. In 1975, when he showed the galleys of his second novel, ''Beyond the Bedroom Wall,'' to William Maxwell, Mr. Woiwode's editor at The New Yorker, Mr. Maxwell went through the pages and remarked, ''Goodness, you've changed almost every one of these.''

Mr. Woiwode was impressed that Mr. Maxwell recalled the original versions of the stories, which, of course, had been edited by Mr. Maxwell when they appeared originally in The New Yorker, but which had evolved considerably as they were woven into a novel of more than 600 pages. He also sensed what he later interpreted as dismay in his editor's voice. This further encouraged him to collect the stories in the form and order they were originally written, to add three from a later period and to publish them under the title ''The Neumiller Stories.''

The dismay that Mr. Woiwode detected in his editor no doubt was an expression of respect for the stories as they originally had been. But after reading the present collection, one could understand it if Mr. Maxwell were also regretting what the stories had become.

Although it is hard to recall ''Beyond the Bedroom Wall'' precisely from reading it some 15 years ago, three things do stand out clearly enough in one's memory (which is refreshed somewhat by a reading of the present collection). The first is the vivid power of certain episodes in the four-generation history of this Midwestern American family from North Dakota. The second is the unwieldy and sometimes artificially contrived narrative machinery that was required to connect these episodes and make them flow in time. And the third is the pointlessness of that machinery - its failure to say anything remarkable about the influence of one generation on the next, or the interaction between character and history, except possibly that patterns repeat themselves down through the generations.

Reading ''The Neumiller Stories'' only confirms such impressions. In them, we encounter some of the same episodes, most memorably the story, called ''Burial'' in the present volume, in which the second generation's Charles Neumiller returns to Mahomet, N.D., and buries his father, Otto, on the old man's homestead, after building him a coffin and washing and clothing his corpse.

Yet the dramatic impact of the episodes remains at least as powerful. The title of the novel is clarified by the story ''Beyond the Bedroom Wall,'' in which one of the fourth-generation children (one guesses it is the youngest of the three boys, Timothy, because he is the narrator of the novel) recounts in the first person singular the night his mother, Alpha, died. He wakes in the dark of his room, tries to get out of bed and, disoriented, strikes the wall.

''If there was a wall where I was convinced there was none, I couldn't imagine what waited for me in that emptiness where the wall should be. I pulled my arm back and held it over my chest, afraid to move, afraid of the dark.''

Some of the effects in the stories seem, if anything, more powerful than those of the novel. There is, for example, the sudden telescoping of time at the end of ''The Visitation,'' where Jerome Neumiller, looking up at two uncles who are visiting his mother, suddenly sees them retreating into the past and finds himself recalling their death in a car accident as he sits on his bed in a Chicago hospital where at age 27 he is an intern.

Or there is the transition from the second-generation Charles Neumiller of ''Burial'' to the fourth-generation Charles Neumiller of the succeeding story, ''Firstborn,'' about the death of a premature infant. Such simple narrative techniques serve far more effectively to compress the passage of time than do any of the novel's more elaborate strategies.

All of which suggests that Mr. Woiwode may simply be better working on a smaller canvas. And, in fact, if you compare ''The Neumiller Stories'' to the author's most recent novel, ''Born Brothers'' (1988), a sequel to ''Beyond the Bedroom Wall'' and another 600-page history of the Neumiller clan, such speculation is further confirmed.

What obsesses Mr. Woiwode above all is to repossess the fleeting illusion of childhood's immortality - to find the language to recapture that special past, whether through the child's eye or the adult's.

''The surrounding objects were as real and as awesome as a roomful of strangers, and more compelling,'' observes the nameless narrator of ''The Old Halvorson Place'' about the appeal to one generation of Neumiller children of their house's attic. ''They belonged to a world removed not only by time - by half a century, as their father said - but by convention and law: the world of adults. Here they could handle and examine that world in every detail (and only through touch would it give up its mystery), without interference or protest, as they could not examine the world of their parents.''

Actually, in Mr. Woiwode's case, what is most engaging about his search for the past is the passion with which he carries it out, especially considering the increasing familiarity of the territory where he invariably ends up. With a perspective developed from experience, he seems to have developed a sense of humor about the obsessiveness of his younger self. ''Oh, Colette, Colette, if I could kiss the calluses on your writing hand,'' he writes in his Preface of that younger self who planned ''to purge every trace of falsity and rhetoric from his fiction.''

Perhaps, as he admits only half-facetiously, he failed at that mission. And perhaps he has published these stories in a spirit of condescension toward the young zealot he once was. But these pieces work better than he seems to realize, especially when compared with his more ambitious strivings. These stories bring Mr. Woiwode back to solid earth, where with regained leverage he may yet lift things of surprising consequence.